GRAND RAPIDS – Do high-stakes tests benefit both teachers and students by showing where improvement is needed, or do they deny students a rich, meaningful education?

Interesting debate after Sunday’s post about the American Federation of Teachers members unanimously approved a resolution opposing exams such as the MEAP, which have played a larger role in schools since the No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2001.

A growing number of states are attaching student progress on standardized exams to teacher evaluations. -- though which exams and how often they'd be offered is still up for debate.

Exams are expected to play a larger role nationally with 46 states signing on to a common core curriculum that includes a common, computer adaptive exam by 2015.

Unions have opposed the increasing weight on the standardized exams – calling it a fixation -- and nearly 23,000 parents, teachers and have signed on to AFT’s petition demanding an end to high-stakes testing.

“It’s time to restore balance in our schools so that teaching and learning, not testing, are at the center of education,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said at the event in Detroit.

“Test-driven education policies continue to force educators to sacrifice time needed to help students learn to critically analyze content and, instead, focus on teaching to the test. And students lose out on rich learning experiences when districts cut art, music, sports, social studies, science and other subjects to focus strictly on math and reading tests.”

Reader john214 said the exams are needed to measure progress.

“Tests covering what students are expected to learn (guided by an agreed-upon curriculum) serve a useful purpose — to provide evidence of student effort, of student learning, of what teachers taught, and of what teachers may have failed to teach.

When test scores are low, critics of testing argue for a holistic view of student achievement that focuses on non-test indicators of performance rather than teaching to the test. When results show improvement, they counter that the scores are suspect because teachers are just teaching to the test. If a state test is well conceived, both these arguments fail to hold water.”

Reader jaymej13 replied:

“Nice. Your point is understood, but you miss the real point. The state test is not well-conceived, and students take tests all the time that generate data about their abilities. They also give them grades based on the results. I bet you had them in school too.

You don't need a standardized test to collect data that ranks teachers on how well someone else takes a test. That's the point.

My real question would be what is the point of the test anyway? The students receive no grade for it. The parents don't really understand it. So what is the point except to gather data and rank things? Why are we even doing that? I guess we can say it’s so parents can judge what schools to send their kids to, but a lot of parents don't even know who their child's teacher is, so do you think they’re going to look up the grade of the school, or its rankings? Most people judge the success of the school by the happiness, or success of their child. Not by a score that they don't even understand.”

I’d disagree about parents not knowing their child’s teachers, at least at the elementary level. If parents don’t understand the scores, it might mean the professional educators need to do a better job explaining to parents and others in the community about what the scores mean and why they are important.

And svlguy2 has issues with the companies that write the tests, the people who grade them, the students who take them and the state leaders who determine what a constitutes a passing score.

“It has long been known that such tests are imprecise and often-misleading measures of anything at all. It is a billion-dollar-a-year industry, which makes huge profits for the testing companies, who pay minimum wages to college drop-outs to 'grade' many of the students exams (in assembly-line test-grading factories).
Such tests have very little, if anything, to do with life success or even college success. Most of our legislators and congressmen couldn't pass them.
Many students hate them, resent them, and put no effort at all into trying to 'pass' such tests; there is no reward or motivation for most students to do well. There anecdotal accounts (from other students) of some students deliberately marking wrong answers, or answering ‘all B's’ for example, to protest what they see as a waste of time, or to 'get back' at a teacher or school they don't like -- knowing that if enough students ‘fail’ the test, that teacher will be fired.
Plus, the selection of test questions -- and what score constitutes a ‘passing’ grade -- is entirely arbitrary, with little relationship to real life needs and circumstances.
The bottom line is that such tests absolutely are not adequate or reliable as measures of performance, for both students and teachers.”

I think the test-makers might disagree about the quality of the exams and the people grading them, and I know the state Education Department has recently had vigorous debates about “cut scores,” or the level at which someone is considered “proficient.”

Reader bigjoe believes the union members have a different, unspoken, reason for opposing the exams.

“Funny how unions never want to graded, in any meaningful manner. I wish I could get away with that in business. ‘Whatever I produce is acceptable.’ This is why we are in trouble in the USA.”

And tauruscanus brings us back to familiar ground.

“A better idea is to promote high stakes parenting. I taught for 10 years and witnessed absolute shameful parenting skills by individuals. Many parents did not even know their children's teachers names. Many did not even show up to parent teacher conferences. The only time you heard from many parents was during report card time -- that is, when poor grades were earned by their child. By then it is too late and even parents did not pay attention to quarterly or mid-term grades.

How can teachers force many parents to straighten up and take a lead in promoting education at home? They can't. Just in the past five years I noticed students are acting worse than ever before with school administrators trying to keep parents happy. The teacher(s) are caught in the middle.

So, it is time for another election. Time for the politicians to bash only the teachers again, thus continues the cycle of blame without naming all the participants. A level or trust and understanding are needed to creating a zone of learning that all need to embrace.

Common testing does nothing but skew curricular plans into teaching to the test!”